India Will Retaliate to Withdrawal of GSP by US

India has threatened to react to ongoing trade disputes that it currently has going on with the US, if the latter moves to have India stripped of its Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) status, by dragging the US to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to sort out the current dispute. While a United States Trade Representative (USTR) had announced back in April that the US would review GSP status of India, Indonesia and Kazhakstan, more recent moves by President Trump that saw imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminium products from several countries that included India, have gone a long way to souring the trade relationship between these two countries. Threatened by the prospect of losing GSP status on goods worth approximately 5.6 billion dollars that it trades with the US every year, it would be an unnecessary burden on the products trying to make their way into the US by rendering them more expensive than alternatives.

India has gone so far as to point out that the removal of GSP status on products it currently exports to the US will make it more expensive for US consumers to afford them once they enter the country. If GSP is removed, then the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status would make this a certainty, rather than just a potential worry. On the other side of this trade equation, India maintains its stringent measures on producers of dairy products from other countries having to declare that the livestock animals from where the milk is taken have not been fed any feed with blood meal or other internal organs in it. This would be a severe case of going against the largely Hindu sentiment of having the livestock animals be fed feeds that have no traces of other animals, to be strictly observed on mostly religious grounds.